It looks like there is a healthy competition between these companies that will do much to keep their respective Hadoops systems competitive. MapR Spark, Hortonworks Spark on Yarn and Cloudera Manager's support for Spark are pushing the boundaries of big data.

For more on Cloudera's options for implementing Spark, incuding on YARN, click here. Given Cloudera's use of YARN, the key difference between Cloudera and Hortonworks use of Spark seems to boil down to the management software used for deploying, monitoring, and managing the software (YARN does the workloads). In Cloudera's case it's commerical Cloudera Manager software. In Hortonworks' case it's open source Ambari software, but Ambari support is part of what Hortonworks is still working on at this point. Reading between the lines, I would expect HDP 2.1 to become generally available until this fall.

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